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Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Back
Page
Might
Twenty
Need
Twenties
Feel
Pages
Feels
Hundred
Needs
Maybe
Even
Five
Rewriting
Every
Start
Fifty

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My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.
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In terms of work, I never felt that I've done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way.
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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.
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A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.
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You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.
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New York is full of people . . . with a feeling for the tangential adventure, the risky adventure, the interlude that's not likely to end in any double-ring ceremony.
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Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
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Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
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I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer.
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The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.
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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
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Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.
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Anything worth having has its price.
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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
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